Margaret Thatcher | Facts Accomplishments Life View articles featuring Margaret Thatcher Margaret Thatcher Summary Margaret Thatcher was Great Britain’s first female prime minister, serving three consecutive terms in office 1979–1990. Her economic and social policies evolved into a political philosophy known as Thatcherism, similar to Reaganomics in the United States, and part of a world-wide neoliberal movement in the 1980s. She was dubbed the Iron Lady by a Soviet newspaper following a speech she gave in 1976—a nickname that she proudly claimed. Margaret Thatcher’s Early Life Margaret Hilda Roberts was born October 13, 1925, to Alfred and Beatrice Roberts in the market town of Grantham, Lincolnshire, England. Her parents ran a grocery business and lived in an apartment above the shop. They were Methodists who were very involved in the local congregation, raising Margaret and her older sister Muriel in an atmosphere that emphasized self-help, charity, and personal truthfulness. Alfred Roberts was a local councilor in Grantham and a Conservative, and the family would often discuss current political issues.

Margaret attended a local state school and won a place at Somerville College, Oxford, where she studied chemistry from 1943 to 1947. She was elected president of the student Conservative Association at Oxford in 1946 and met many prominent politicians. Her final year, she studied x-ray crystallography with Dorothy Hodgkin, who won a Nobel Prize in chemistry in 1964. After obtaining her degree, Margaret became a research chemist at BX Plastics near Colchester. She was still highly involved in politics, and in the 1950 and 1951 General Elections she ran as the Conservative candidate for Dartford. Although she lost both times, she received national publicity as the youngest female candidate in the country. She also met her husband, Denis Thatcher, in Dartford. He was a local businessman and oil industry executive. After their marriage, Thatcher was able to resign her position at BX Plastics and become a lawyer specializing in taxation. On August 15, 1953, she gave birth to twins Mark and Carol and six months later passed the bar exam.

Thatcher Elected To Parliament In 1959, Thatcher was elected as Member of Parliament for Finchley. By 1961, she was given a junior office in the administration of Harold Macmillan, Prime Minister from January 1957 to October 1963. When the Conservatives were in Opposition from 1964-1970, Thatcher served continuously in various shadow cabinet positions and was appointed Education Secretary when Edward Heath became Prime Minister in 1970. The Heath government was elected on promises of economic revival that would be spurred by introducing more free market policies and taming the trade unions but became one of the most interventionist governments in British history. Thatcher herself faced a difficult job as Education Secretary at the height of student radicalism, with protesters disrupting her speeches, harsh criticism in the opposition press for not being liberal enough, and criticism from Conservatives for veering too far to the left.

Prime Minister Margaret Thatcher When the Heath Government lost a second General Election in October 1974, Thatcher decided to run against Heath for the leadership of the Conservative Party and won in February 1975, becoming the first woman to lead a Western political party and to be Leader of the Opposition in the House of Commons. The economic difficulties experienced by the United Kingdom under the Labour government—requiring credit from the International Monetary Fund in 1976 and causing extensive trade union strikes over pay demands in the winter of 1978–1979—swung public opinion back to the favor of the Conservatives. In the General Election of May 1979, Margaret Thatcher became Prime Minister of the United Kingdom. The Thatcher government had pledged to turn Britain’s economic decline around, mainly by increasing taxes and balancing the budget. By the spring of 1981, recovery had begun, followed by eight years of steady growth. Thatcher demonstrated her confidence, determination, and decisiveness again during the Falklands War—on April 2, 1982, Argentina invaded the British-held Falkland Islands and South Georgia Island.

Although she first pursued a diplomatic resolution, a British military task force was on-hand when that effort failed. The Falklands were back under British control in 74 days, with Argentina surrendering on June 14, 1982. The Conservative government was reelected in June 1983 with its Parliamentary majority more than tripled to 144 seats. The government faced as many challenges as it had during its first term. The labor movement resisted the government’s trade union reforms, with the miners’ union going on a violent, year-long strike beginning in 1984. The union was eventually defeated, and the Labour Opposition quietly accepted the success of the trade union legislation, pledging not to reverse key components. The IRA Bombing In October 1984, the Irish Republican Army bombed the hotel Thatcher and many of her cabinet were staying in during the Conservative Party annual conference. She had refused to meet their political demands, particularly during the 1980-1981 prison hunger strikes. Thatcher was unhurt although several colleagues were among the dead and injured, and she appeared the next morning, defiant and undeterred from continuing with the conference.

In 1985, she signed the Anglo-Irish Agreement with Irish Prime Minister Garret FitzGerald. The treaty established the Anglo-Irish Intergovernmental Conference, which gave the Irish government an advisory role in Northern Ireland’s government and confirmed Northern Ireland’s constitutional position. Although the agreement did not immediately end violence in Northern Ireland, it was crucial in the peace process by improving cooperation between the British and Irish governments. Thatcher’s policies continued to help the economy improve. In the mid-1980s, the government began to privatize state assets by offering shares to the public and providing generous terms to small investors. It also encouraged people to buy their own homes, invest in private pensions, and save through the stock market. Divisions in the Conservative party became more apparent in the mid to late 1980s. The Westland Affair, a 1986 political scandal involving the buyout of financially troubled British helicopter manufacturer Westland, resulted in the resignation of two of Thatcher’s cabinet members. Thatcher was also heavily criticized for allowing US warplanes to fly from British bases to attack targets in Libya.

Undaunted by the criticism, Thatcher intimated plans for additional reforms during the Conservative Party’s annual conference in October 1986 and, thanks to her economic policies that resulted in a strong British economy, the Conservative Party prevailed again in the General Election in June 1987. Thatcher’s Third Term Thatcher’s third term in office was marked by reforms to the education system, National Health Service, and the local government tax system or poll tax, as it became known. At the same time, the end of the Cold War revived the project for a single European currency and long-standing divisions in the Conservative Party over this issue gave rise to a challenge to Thatcher’s leadership. In the ballot that followed, she won but by an insufficient margin and resigned as Prime Minister on November 28, 1990, choosing John Major as her successor. Margaret Thatcher’s Private Life She continued to be an active political figure, setting up the Margaret Thatcher Foundation to continue promoting her ideas, going on lecture tours, writing two memoirs and a book on international politics (Statecraft), and intervening in both domestic and international affairs.

On June 30, 1992, she was elevated to the House of Lords to become Baroness Thatcher of Kesteven. In March 2002, she retired from public speaking after several small strokes. Just over a year later, in June 2003, her husband of more than 50 years died, a devastating loss. Although she has retired from public speaking, the economic crisis in 2008 revived the debate over Thatcher’s policies from the 1980s and their lasting impact on the British economy. Articles Featuring Margaret Thatcher From British History Magazine [tabby title=’Featured Margaret Thatcher Article’] Margaret Thatcher: Iron Lady By Siân Ellis A Conservative minister later remarked that she “carried the authority of her office always with her. It was in her handbag….She was asserting it the whole time.” Just as Chamberlain had had his umbrella and Churchill his cigar, “Maggie’s” physical and metaphorical prop was her handbag. It contained crumpled notes full of facts and figures that could floor an interlocutor at 20 paces. “She cannot see an institution without hitting it with her handbag,” another observer wrote.

The “handbagger”—prime minister for 11 years, six months and 24 days (1979-90)—turned around the ruinously ailing British economy of the 1970s and shook the nation out of its demoralized slough. She broke the mold—she was the first woman prime minister in Europe and the longest-serving head of government in Britain in the 20th century. She achieved iconic status in the Conservative Party and, as the country’s representative, internationally. “Thatcherism” became a label not just for her aggressive “conviction” politics but also a byword for the changed spirit of the 1980s. It’s a paradox, then, how much Thatcher was an Establishment outsider. She herself noted, in her autobiography The Path to Power, “I was often portrayed as an outsider who by some odd mixture of circumstances had stepped inside and stayed there for eleven and a half years; in my case the portrayal was not inaccurate.” By virtue of her social and nonconformist religious background she was an outsider in the patrician Conservative Party. By her heretical economic views she was a minority voice.

By her individualism in the notoriously clubby world of politics, she generated suspicion. By her behavior in the European arena, she made heads of state bristle. By her very handbag, that symbol of femininity, she stood out from the male crowd of politicians. And by the fact that she wielded it with such masculine force she seemed an aberration of genteel womanhood. What shaped such individualism? Margaret Hilda Roberts was born October 13, 1925. Her father, Alfred, a self-made man, ran a grocery with his wife, Beatrice, in the provincial Lincolnshire market town of Grantham. They had an elder daughter, Muriel, born in 1921. Home was, Margaret recalled, “practical, serious and intensely religious.” Indeed life revolved around Methodism, with its churchgoing and music. Young Margaret became an accomplished pianist. This childhood living over the shop was “an idyllic blur,” with customers coming and going, Margaret helping to weigh out sugar, tea and coffee.

The grocer’s daughter learned the basic tenets of economics, and from her mother she absorbed the efficient, make-good-and-mend housekeeping of the self-respecting middle class, virtues accentuated by World War II privations. Her father was an upstanding figure in the community, a lay preacher, an independent town councilor and later alderman. “Individual responsibility was his watchword and sound finance his passion,” Margaret remembered. From him she claimed her integrity—and a fondness for homespun aphorisms. “Never do things just because other people do them” was a favorite, and it was to stand the Grantham girl in good stead. The family was “highly political,” and Margaret, aged just 10, could be found folding general election leaflets for a local Conservative candidate. At Kesteven and Grantham Girls’ (grammar) School she was a diligent but not star pupil; blessed with logic and determination, she shone in the debating society. She took elocution lessons—a pre-requisite for getting on in the world. Hers was also a dreamy nature. She loved Rudyard Kipling, the patriotic poet of British Empire, and the exotic worlds beyond Grantham that he portrayed.

And when the cinema arrived in town, she was entranced by Hollywood romance, reflecting that maybe it was a “fortunate restraint” that she was not allowed to watch films too often. Margaret won a place to study chemistry at Somerville College, Oxford, in 1943. She cut a rather serious, slightly lonely figure: work, religion and, increasingly, politics filled her time rather than socializing. In 1946 she became president of the Oxford University Conservative Association—only the second female to hold the post in its history. Strange, perhaps, that a middle-class grammar school girl should be drawn to an essentially public school-dominated party. But its dicta, such as self-reliance, appealed to her. When she left Oxford with a second-class chemistry degree, she joined BX Plastics near Colchester to work in research and development. However, she knew her true ambition was to be a member of Parliament. She got her wish, after a struggle, in 1959 when she was elected Conservative MP for Finchley, north London. It had been a busy decade post-Oxford: in 1951 she wed Denis Thatcher, a well-to-do businessman and divorcé 10 years her senior.

Early married life was “very heaven,” and in ensuing years in a series of homes in London and Kent she enjoyed interior decorating, gardening and collecting porcelain. Denis’ income meant Margaret no longer needed to earn a living, and she studied law. In 1953 she gave birth to twins, Mark and Carol; by the time they were 6 months old she had passed her bar exams. “While the home must always be the centre of one’s life, it should not be the boundary of one’s ambitions,” she liked to say. Fortunately, the Thatchers could afford a nanny to allow this. The London Evening News heralded Margaret Thatcher’s entry into Parliament with the headline “Mark’s Mummy is an MP Now.” Women were a rarity at this level of politics—just 25 of 630 MPs—and Thatcher was given various shadow cabinet positions in “women’s” areas such as pensions. In the 1970 Conservative government under Edward Heath, she became secretary of state for education and science (1970-74). Sadly, neither her father nor her mother had lived to see this success.

“The fifties marked the start of a major change in the role of women,” Thatcher reflected in her autobiography. In the male preserve of the House of Commons and in the cabinet she felt isolated. Her strident tone, perhaps an overcompensation as she tried to prove herself, further alienated male colleagues. Yet there were plus-points to being different. Blonde, attractive, always immaculately dressed and a zealous worker, she stood out and was for some while a media darling. The tide turned when as education secretary, forced to cut her budget, she stopped the provision of free milk to schoolchildren over the age of 7. Tabloid headlines raged “Mrs. Thatcher, Milk Snatcher” and asked if she was the most hated woman in Britain. She was deeply upset. The Heath government fell in 1974 amid rising inflation and labor unrest. Keith Joseph, the right-wing intellectual who set up the Centre for Policy Studies to analyze Britain’s economic problems and devise a remedy, appeared set to challenge Heath as Conservative leader. He bungled his chances however, and unexpectedly Thatcher, one of his most ardent supporters, stepped into the breach.

On February 11, 1975, she won the contest to head the Conservative Party. Reactions were mixed. None of the party heavyweights had voted for Thatcher, and the victory, “the Peasants’ Revolt,” was thought a brief seizure of power by the lower orders. She was “trade” after all. Others welcomed the rise of a grocer’s daughter, believing it would help redress the Conservatives’ stuffy image. Thatcher continued her lifelong makeover: changing hairstyle, clothes and, through further voice coaching, lowering her voice from its gratingly high pitch to a more commanding contralto. But the greatest boost to her reputation came following a speech she made in 1976 criticizing the Soviet Union when the Red Army newspaper Jrasbata Zvezda (Red Star) dubbed her “the Iron Lady.” Instantly, an icon was born.

She trumpeted the role, later addressing a public meeting, “I stand before you tonight in my Red Star chiffon evening gown, my face softly made up and my fair hair gently waved: the Iron Lady of the Western World!” When Thatcher was elected Britain’s first female prime minister on May 4, 1979, it was against a background of soaring inflation, bitter labor disputes, rising unemployment and declining trade figures—a result of the collectivist and consensus policies that both Labour and Conservative postwar governments had pursued. Influenced by her upbringing and, now, the ideas of Keith Joseph and American economist Milton Friedman, Thatcher was set on what became known as monetarism and, through her implementation, Thatcherism. This economic theory advocated individual enterprise and a reduction in state intervention. State-subsidized industry and jobs instilled no incentive to compete, put too much money into the economy and encouraged inflation. Thatcherism valued individual responsibility: Taxes and government spending on state-provided welfare should be lower to allow individuals to use their money to support themselves as they choose. The state should be servant, not master. Thatcher ushered in a decade of painful reform, privatization, deregulation and tax cutting.

At first inflation and unemployment rocketed, some businesses crumbled. But—“the lady’s not for turning”—the prime minister brazened it out over three historic terms of office, wrenching the economy back off its knees. At least one widely popular measure was the sale of council houses, allowing by 1982 a half-million people to become homeowners (and possibly Tory voters) for the first time. Paradigmatic of Thatcher’s ruthless resolve—and crucial to the success of monetarism—was her defeat of the National Union of Mine Workers, which, in March 1984, called a strike over plans to close unprofitable pits. The threat to the national fuel supply raised the specter of an ungovernable country. The strike lasted a year and saw police and miners in ugly pitched battles. But Thatcher had stockpiled coal reserves, ready to defend democracy against her bête noire of socialism, the militant trade unions. She won. Whole mining communities suffered badly, yet the greater community of democratic Britain survived. Tougher legislation was later introduced to curb future union power. The general mood of the country, fed up with disruptive strikes, was with Thatcher on the need for change.

The prime minister was equally tough in 1984 when an Irish Republican Army bomb meant for her exploded in the Brighton hotel where Tory Party members were staying overnight for their annual conference. Having hardly slept, she appeared on the conference platform the next day, neatly dressed and made up, defiant that democratic business should continue. The image went around the world. If defeating the unions epitomized Thatcher on the domestic front, then victory against Argentina in the Falkland Islands was a key event abroad. Few people had even heard of the tiny British dependency (population 1,800) near Cape Horn, but invasion by Argentina in April 1982 offended every patriotic fiber in Thatcher’s body. Raised on the Churchillian belief that Britain was capable of epic things on the world stage, she sent ships to retake the islands. By mid-June the war was won—at a cost of 255 British lives. Principle had been upheld; a new sense of national confidence emerged. Thatcher’s flagging popularity ratings also benefited. Less spectacular but truly far-reaching was Thatcher’s role in bringing about the end of the Cold War and contributing to the demise of communism in Central and Eastern Europe.

As an individualist and free market advocate, she had an innate and frequently voiced distrust of communism. In Soviet leader Mikhail Gorbachev, however, she found a man she “could do business with,” and she helped to persuade President Ronald Reagan away from “evil Empire” rhetoric to do the same. The chemistry between Reagan and Thatcher made their alliance a high point of the special relationship between Britain and the United States in the 20th century. “She was warm, feminine, gracious and intelligent and it was evident from our first words that we were soul mates when it came to reducing government and expanding economic freedom,” Reagan remarked. Instinctively an Atlanticist, Thatcher was less easy about European union. She demanded—and got—a refund on Britain’s excessive contributions to the European Economic Community with a belligerence that set the tone for future negotiations. While in favor of a common market, she resisted measures that could inch member countries toward a federalist super state and erode British sovereignty. Britain would stand aside from mainstream integration. Behind the scenes, Thatcher had an awesome work ethic. She slept only four hours a night and “living over the shop” at 10 Downing St.

suited her (there’s a delicious irony in a grocer’s daughter running a “nation of shopkeepers”). She quickly mastered briefs in minute detail and was intolerant of “woolly” thinking. Yet, despite popular opinion to the contrary, she could be persuaded by others’ views—if well argued. Behind the hectoring caricatures—Attila the Hen, TBW (That Bloody Woman)—a far more charming, feminine side existed and was employed to get her own way. “Perhaps we were a little bit in love with her,” one young man who worked for her recalled. She enjoyed male company, female less so (the Queen was said to dislike their weekly meetings). Staff at No. 10 adored her for the thousand small kindnesses she showed, such as asking after the health of an ailing family member. This was not the uncaring tyrant of cartoonists. On occasion she appeared blissfully unstreetwise, most famously when she declared in admiration of her faithful deputy, Willie Whitelaw, “Every prime minister needs a Willie.” Thatcher’s home life, indeed her career, had the firm anchor of her husband Denis.

The media affectionately portrayed him as a gin-swilling, golf-playing buffoon, but he fulfilled his role of consort to perfection, content to support, a silent smile on his face. He had helped give the Grantham girl social confidence, and his money had allowed her to chase her ambition; his own success meant he felt unthreatened by her achievement. He encouraged, advised, gave the arm that consoled, and he alone could call late-night meetings to a close, tapping his watch and reminding, “Margaret, time for Bedfordshire.” In the morning, Margaret would cook his breakfast. She also doted on her son, Mark; relations with Carol seemed a little less close. The public rarely glimpsed any chinks in the Iron Lady’s armor, and in the end she stayed too long in power. She was perceived to be arrogant, dictatorial, contemptuously handbagging her cabinet colleagues. She badly misjudged when she introduced the notorious poll tax despite advice against it; she openly clashed with her chancellor over monetary policy and with her foreign secretary on European policy. Both resigned, precipitating a party leadership battle, which concluded in Thatcher’s resignation on November 28, 1990.

She was cast back outside. For once the tears were public as she left 10 Downing St. Elevated to the House of Lords, she styled herself Baroness Thatcher of Kesteven in honor of her roots. She set up the Margaret Thatcher Foundation to continue to promote her ideas and undertook lecture tours; she was particularly gratified by her welcome in the United States, “the seat of radical modern conservative thinking and almost my second home.” After a series of small strokes, doctors advised her in 2002 against public speaking. In 2003 Denis, her constant companion, died; they had been married 52 years. More than any political knocks, it was a devastating loss. Margaret Thatcher and Thatcherism often evoke visceral love or hate. She was a role model for individualism and the success of the individual who worked hard—not always an easy trajectory in a nation of team players where traditionally it’s the playing, not the winning, that counts. Some said her policies legitimized selfishness. Feminists murmured that she failed to help other women break into public life—women were notably absent from high office in her governments. But that missed the point of her individualism, and she led by example.

Her legacy, like her life, is one of paradox. A force for change, she saved her country from the economic mire and made it governable again, but threw the Conservative Party into turmoil. She altered national attitudes: After monetarism there has been no return to Keynesian economics, and Britain is no longer the sick country of Europe. She consolidated the Atlantic Alliance and helped create the dynamics of the post–Cold War world, but left the Tory Party—and the country—deeply divided on Europe and integration into its union. However these legacies play out, Margaret Thatcher will be seen as an icon of the 20th century and one of Britain’s outstanding peacetime prime ministers.

[tabby title=’More Margaret Thatcher Articles’][srp widget_title=”” widget_css_id=”testing-grid” post_type=”post” post_content_type=”content” post_content_length=”50″ post_content_length_mode=”words” post_title_length=”12″ post_title_length_mode=”words” post_date=”no” post_offset=”1″ category_include=”199″ string_break=” More…” layout_mode=”multi_column” srp post_limit=”200″ display_thumbnail=”no” vf_everything=”no”][tabbyending] Copyright 2014 British Heritage. Margaret Thatcher biography | birthday, trivia | British Prime Minister of Great Britain | Who2 Name at birth: Margaret Hilda Roberts Margaret Thatcher was the United Kingdom’s first woman prime minister. She held the office of PM for 11 years — longer than anyone in the 20th century. As Margaret Roberts she attended Somerville College, Oxford, where she earned a chemistry degree (1947) and was president of the student Conservative Association. In the 1950s she trained as a lawyer and then was elected to Parliament as the member for Finchley in 1959.

Her reputation as a rock-ribbed conservative grew over the next two decades, and she was named prime minister on 4 May 1979. Margaret Thatcher shored up a Conservative-led government, favored privatization rather than government expansion, led the country through the Falklands War with Argentina, and did it all with a stern no-nonsense flair that earned her the nickname “The Iron Lady.” Margaret Thatcher served three consecutive terms as prime minister, although political disputes and discontent within her party forced her to resign on 28 November 1990. She was succeeded by fellow Conservative John Major. Margaret Thatcher published the memoirs The Downing Street Years (1993) and The Path to Power (1995). In later years she suffered from dementia, and she died after a stroke on April 8, 2013. Three years later, the UK’s second female prime minister took office: Theresa May , also a Conservative, became PM in 2016.

Extra credit Margaret Thatcher entered the House of Lords in 1992 as Baroness Thatcher of Kesteven… She has often been compared with her conservative American counterpart, Ronald Reagan … She married Denis Thatcher in 1951. Their twin children, Carol and Mark, were born in 1953. Denis Thatcher was an oil company executive; he died in 2003… Mark Thatcher was arrested at his South African home in 2004 on a charge of financing an attempted coup in oil-rich Equatorial Guinea; he pled guilty to a charge of negligence, saying he thought the money would be used for an air ambulance service… Carol Thatcher announced in 2008 that Margaret Thatcher had been suffering from mental decline since 2000, when she first had a series of small strokes… Margaret Thatcher was played by actress Meryl Streep in the 2011 film The Iron Lady; the role won Streep an Academy Award as best actress. Margaret Thatcher Margaret Thatcher Margaret Thatcher Margaret Thatcher's political career has been one of the most remarkable of modern times.

Born in October 1925 at Grantham, a small market town in eastern England, she rose to become the first (and for two decades the only) woman to lead a major Western democracy. She won three successive General Elections and served as British Prime Minister for more than eleven years (1979-90), a record unmatched in the twentieth century. During her term of office she reshaped almost every aspect of British politics, reviving the economy, reforming outdated institutions, and reinvigorating the nation's foreign policy. She challenged and did much to overturn the psychology of decline which had become rooted in Britain since the Second World War, pursuing national recovery with striking energy and determination. In the process, Margaret Thatcher became one of the founders, with Ronald Reagan, of a school of conservative conviction politics, which has had a powerful and enduring impact on politics in Britain and the United States and earned her a higher international profile than any British politician since Winston Churchill.

By successfully shifting British economic and foreign policy to the right, her governments helped to encourage wider international trends which broadened and deepened during the 1980s and 1990s, as the end of the Cold War, the spread of democracy, and the growth of free markets strengthened political and economic freedom in every continent. Margaret Thatcher became one of the world's most influential and respected political leaders, as well as one of the most controversial, dynamic, and plain-spoken, a reference point for friends and enemies alike. Margaret Thatcher's home and early life in Grantham played a large part in forming her political convictions. Her parents, Alfred and Beatrice Roberts, were Methodists. The social life of the family was lived largely within the close community of the local congregation, bounded by strong traditions of self-help, charitable work, and personal truthfulness. The Roberts family ran a grocery business, bringing up their two daughters in a flat over the shop. Margaret Roberts attended a local state school and from there won a place at Oxford, where she studied chemistry at Somerville College (1943-47).

Her tutor was Dorothy Hodgkin, a pioneer of X-ray crystallography who won a Nobel Prize in 1964. Her outlook was profoundly influenced by her scientific training. But chemistry took second place to politics in Margaret Thatcher's future plans. Conservative politics had always been a feature of her home life: her father was a local councillor in Grantham and talked through with her the issues of the day. She was elected president of the student Conservative Association at Oxford and met many prominent politicians, making herself known to the leadership of her party at the time of its devastating defeat by Labour at the General Election of 1945. In her mid-twenties she ran as the Conservative candidate for the strong Labour seat of Dartford at the General Elections of 1950 and 1951, winning national publicity as the youngest woman candidate in the country. She lost both times, but cut the Labour majority sharply and hugely enjoyed the experience of campaigning. Aspects of her mature political style were formed in Dartford, a largely working class constituency which suffered as much as any from post-war rationing and shortages, as well as the rising level of taxation and state regulation.

Unlike many Conservatives at that time, she had little difficulty getting a hearing from any audience and she spoke easily, with force and confidence, on issues that mattered to the voters. It was in Dartford too that she met her husband, Denis Thatcher, a local businessman who ran his family's firm before becoming an executive in the oil industry. They married in 1951. Twins — Mark and Carol —were born to the couple in 1953. In the 1950s Margaret Thatcher trained as a lawyer, specialising in taxation. She was elected to Parliament in 1959 as Member of Parliament (MP) for Finchley, a north London constituency, which she continued to represent until she was made a member of the House of Lords (as Baroness Thatcher) in 1992. Within two years, she was given junior office in the administration of Harold Macmillan and during 1964-70 (when the Conservatives were again in Opposition), established her place among the senior figures of the party, serving continuously as a shadow minister. When the Conservatives returned to office in 1970, under the premiership of Edward Heath, she achieved cabinet rank as Education Secretary.

Margaret Thatcher had a rough ride as Education Minister. The early 1970s saw student radicalism at its height and British politics at its least civil. Protesters disrupted her speeches, the opposition press vilified her, and education policy itself seemed set immovably in a leftwards course, which she and many Conservatives found uncomfortable. But she mastered the job and was toughened by the experience. The Heath Government itself took a beating from events during its tenure (1970-74) and disappointed many. Elected on promises of economic revival through taming the trade unions and introducing more free market policies, it executed a series of policy reverses — nicknamed the 'U turns' — to become one of the most interventionist governments in British history, negotiating with the unions to introduce detailed control of wages, prices, and dividends. Defeated at a General Election in February 1974, the Heath Government left a legacy of inflation and industrial strife. Many Conservatives were ready for a new approach after the Heath Government and when the Party lost a second General Election in October 1974, Margaret Thatcher ran against Heath for the leadership.

To general surprise (her own included), in February 1975 she defeated him on the first ballot and won the contest outright on the second, though challenged by half a dozen senior colleagues. She became the first woman ever to lead a Western political party and to serve as Leader of the Opposition in the House of Commons. The Labour Government of 1974-79 was one of the most crisis-prone in British history, leading the country to a state of virtual bankruptcy in 1976 when a collapse in the value of the currency on the foreign exchanges forced the government to negotiate credit from the International Monetary Fund (IMF). The IMF imposed tight expenditure controls on the government as a condition of the loan, which, ironically, improved Labour's public standing. By summer 1978, it even looked possible that it might win re-election. But over the winter of 1978/79, Labour's luck ran out. Trade union pay demands led to an epidemic of strikes and showed that the government had little influence over its allies in the labour movement. Public opinion swung against Labour and the Conservatives won a Parliamentary majority of 43 at the General Election of May 1979.

The following day, Margaret Thatcher became Prime Minister of the United Kingdom. Baroness Thatcher of Kesteven Mrs. Thatcher’s party won the 1979 election and she became prime minister— the first woman to do so. It was better than watching sports on television. There was nothing like it. Every day she would do something big, and every day she would not apologize for it, even when reporters would press her. You just never saw anyone so direct or clear of speech. Mrs. Thatcher faced a situation in Britain that was devastating, much like the situation we have today in our own country. What she did was to make plain that situation and to place great faith in the people of her country, and then when they were asked to choose, they chose for her over and over again. Indeed, she never lost an election after she won the first one. She only lost her job as prime minister because her party got tired of her. They were not as strong as she was and they threw her out, and she left very nobly. A coal strike led by a very left wing man named Arthur Scargill, who was the head of the coal miners union.

That union was powerful because people got their heat from coal, and if the union didn’t mine coal in the winter, people got cold. The major political party opposed to Mrs. Thatcher’s Conservative party, the Labor party, was basically controlled at that time in its governing structure by the labor unions, and the worst and most aggressive of them was the coal miners. So the Prime Minister stood largely alone, and great powers were arrayed against her. And what she did was store up a bunch of coal to get ready for a strike because she knew Mr. Scargill was going to call one, and he did call one. The coal mining regions of the country had thousands of people picketing, and parts of the country basically ceased to function. This had happened many times in the past, and the government had capitulated. But this time there was Mrs. Thatcher at the head of the government, and there was something called the Battle of Orgreave, in which five thousand miners clashed with five thousand policemen. The policemen triumphed, and there were over 100 casualties. That was a battle for the soul of the country, and the Prime Minister was very clear about it.

She explained that the stakes were enormous and that the government was going to stand up for the country. There was no wiggle in her. She didn’t budge. And what happened was that a large part of the membership of the miners union broke off, formed their own union, and made a deal that was in their interest but was not what Scargill had demanded. So Mrs. Thatcher basically broke that strike, and she broke that kind of unionism. The other kind—the kind where people act under laws that are fair, and where unions don’t take over parts of the country or the property of others—that kind of unionism thrives in Britain today. And so far there has not been an effort to bring back the destructive kind. You probably know that Mrs. Thatcher was almost killed when IRA terrorists put a bomb in her hotel during the annual Conservative Party Conference in 1984. They checked into that hotel months in advance and planted an explosive device set to go off near where the Prime Minister slept. It did go off, and it killed five people, but Mrs. Thatcher was working late and her life was spared.

IRA terrorists had previously killed one of her best friends, a man named Airey Neave, a distinguished soldier in World War II and one of the few men to escape the German POW camp at Colditz. He was very close to Mrs. Thatcher, and he was the Shadow Secretary for Northern Ireland. Shortly before she became prime minister, the terrorists placed a bomb in Neave’s car set to explode when the car was at a certain angle coming out of the parking lot underneath the House of Commons, and Airey Neave was killed, having survived the Nazis. Margaret Thatcher had strong reasons to oppose terrorism. And when it happened that several IRA terrorists, the key one being a man named Bobby Sands, went on a hunger strike in the Maze prison in Northern Ireland—they were demanding to be classified as political prisoners rather than as criminals—she stood firm as they starved themselves to death. Over and over, she stated her position forthrightly: “Crime is crime is crime. It is not political. It is crime.” And what that meant was that those terrorists had chosen the wrong time to go on a hunger strike.

We live in an age when a new kind of government has been invented, and it’s not so much that it has different aims, although it does have many different aims, but that it proceeds by a different method—through rules made by so-called experts, who gather the forces of government over themselves. There’s an agency that has been created recently in the United States, and that agency does not get its budget from the Congress of the United States, but from a percentage of the revenues of the Federal Reserve, which gets its revenues as a government monopoly bank. This new agency has regulatory power that will certainly affect each of us as individuals. And Congress is forbidden to hold hearings on the budget of that agency, and that agency routinely refuses inquiries from Congress about its operations. That means it is sealed off from popular control. And the weight and scale of the government run by this new method means that there’s some chance that the government is going to overwhelm the society. That is the very abnegation of liberal politics—liberal in the sense of a free people managing those who govern them because human beings are born equal, with equal rights.

The greatest defender and servant of this principle of liberal government is Margaret Thatcher, and I pray that we will see the likes of her again, because the battle over this kind of government is upon us again. For making clear that the right way of government is to operate under a constitution, and under the control of free people, and for fighting for constitutionalism more effectively than anyone in our time. The new government pledged to check and reverse Britain's economic decline. In the short-term, painful measures were required. Although direct taxes were cut, to restore incentives, the budget had to be balanced, and so indirect taxes were increased. The economy was already entering a recession, but inflation was rising and interest rates had to be raised to control it. By the end of Margaret Thatcher's first term, unemployment in Britain was more than three million and it began to fall only in 1986. A large section of Britain's inefficient manufacturing industry closed down. No one had predicted how severe the downturn would be. But vital long-term gains were made. Inflation was checked and the government created the expectation that it would do whatever was necessary to keep it low.

The budget of spring 1981, increasing taxes at the lowest point of the recession, offended conventional Keynesian economic thinking, but it made possible a cut in interest rates and demonstrated this newly found determination. Economic recovery started in the same quarter and eight years of growth followed. Political support flowed from this achievement, but the re-election of the government was only made certain by an unpredicted event: the Falklands War. The Argentine Junta's invasion of the islands in April 1982 was met by Margaret Thatcher in the firmest way and with a sure touch. Although she worked with the US administration in pursuing the possibility of a diplomatic solution, a British military Task Force was despatched to retake the islands. When diplomacy failed, military action was quickly successful and the Falklands were back under British control by June 1982. The electorate was impressed. Few British or European leaders would have fought for the islands. By doing so, Margaret Thatcher laid the foundation for a much more vigorous and independent British foreign policy during the rest of the 1980s.When the General Election came in June 1983, the government was re-elected with its Parliamentary majority more than trebled (144 seats).

The second term opened with almost as many difficulties as the first. The government found itself challenged by the miners' union, which fought a year-long strike in 1984-85 under militant leadership. In October 1984, when the strike was still underway, the Irish Republican Army (IRA) attempted to murder Margaret Thatcher and many of her cabinet by bombing her hotel in Brighton during the Conservative Party annual conference. Although she survived unhurt, some of her closest colleagues were among the injured and dead and the room next to hers was severely damaged. No twentieth-century British Prime Minister ever came closer to assassination. The economy continued to improve during the 1983-87 Parliament and the policy of economic liberalisation was extended. The government began to pursue a policy of selling state assets, which in total had amounted to more than 20 per cent of the economy when the Conservatives came to power in 1979. The British privatisations of the 1980s were the first of their kind and proved influential across the world. The left wing of the Conservative Party had always been uneasy with its chief.

In January 1986, enduring divisions between left and right in the Thatcher Cabinet were publicly exposed by the sudden resignation of the Defence Minister, Michael Heseltine, in a dispute over the business troubles of the British helicopter manufacturer, Westland. The fallout from the 'Westland Affair' challenged Margaret Thatcher's leadership as never before. She survived the crisis, but its effects were significant. She was subjected to heavy criticism within her own party for the decision to allow US warplanes to fly from British bases to attack targets in Libya (April 1986). There was talk of the government and of its leader being 'tired', of having gone on too long. The legislative platform of the third-term Thatcher Government was among the most ambitious ever put forward by a British administration. There were measures to reform the education system (1988), introducing a national curriculum for the first time. There was a new tax system for local government (1989), the Community Charge, or 'poll tax' as it was dubbed by opponents.

And there was legislation to separate purchasers and providers within the National Health Service (1990), opening up the service to a measure of competition for the first time and increasing the scope for effective management. This took place against a backdrop of international events profoundly helpful to the Conservative cause. Margaret Thatcher played her part in the last phase of the Cold War, both in the strengthening of the Western alliance against the Soviets in the early 1980s and in the successful unwinding of the conflict later in the decade. The Soviets had dubbed her the 'Iron Lady' — a tag she relished — for the tough line she took against them in speeches shortly after becoming Conservative leader in 1975. During the 1980s she offered strong support to the defence policies of the Reagan administration. (Meryl Streep won a Best Actress Academy Award for her portrayal of British prime minister Margaret Thatcher in the The Iron Lady (2011), a sweeping biodrama.

Tracing Thatcher's life from her childhood as a grocer's daughter and her rise through the political ranks to becoming the U.K.'s first female P.M., director Phyllida Lloyd shows how her determination and strength of will earned "the Iron Lady" as many allies as enemies, and the personal price she paid.) By late 1990, the Cold War was over and free markets and institutions vindicated. But that event triggered the next stage in European integration, as France revived the project of a single European currency, hoping to check the power of a reunited Germany. As a result, divisions over European policy within the British Government were deepened by the end of the Cold War and now became acute. On November 1 1990 Sir Geoffrey Howe resigned over Europe and in a bitter resignation speech precipitated a challenge to Margaret Thatcher's leadership of her party by Michael Heseltine. In the ballot that followed, she won a majority of the vote. Yet under party rules the margin was insufficient, and a second ballot was required. Receiving the news at a conference in Paris, she immediately announced her intention to fight on.

But a political earthquake occurred the next day on her return to London, when many colleagues in her cabinet — unsympathetic to her on Europe and doubting that she could win a fourth General Election — abruptly deserted her leadership and left her no choice but to withdraw. She resigned as Prime Minister on November 28 1990. John Major succeeded her and served in the post until the landslide election of Tony Blair's Labour Government in May 1997. After 1990 Lady Thatcher (as she became) remained a potent political figure. She wrote two best-selling volumes of memoirs - The Downing Street Years (1993) and The Path to Power (1995) - while continuing for a full decade to tour the world as a lecturer. A book of reflections on international politics - Statecraft - was published in 2002. During the period she made some important interventions in domestic British politics, notably over Bosnia and the Maastricht Treaty. After a series of small strokes in March 2002 she was advised to withdraw from public speaking, and in 2013 she died of another stroke in London at the age of 87.

Denis Thatcher, her husband of more than fifty years, died in June 2003, receiving warm tributes from all sides. Margaret Thatcher remains an intensely controversial figure in Britain. Critics claim that her economic policies were divisive socially, that she was harsh or 'uncaring' in her politics, and hostile to the institutions of the British welfare state. Defenders point to a transformation in Britain's economic performance over the course of the Thatcher Governments and those of her successors as Prime Minister. Trade union reforms, privatisation, deregulation, a strong anti-inflationary stance, and control of tax and spending have created better economic prospects for Britain than seemed possible when she became Prime Minister in 1979. Critics and supporters alike recognise the Thatcher premiership as a period of fundamental importance in British history. Margaret Thatcher accumulated huge prestige over the course of the 1980s and often compelled the respect even of her bitterest critics. Indeed, her effect on the terms of political debate has been profound.

Whether they were converted to 'Thatcherism', or merely forced by the electorate to pay it lip service, the Labour Party leadership was transformed by her period of office and the 'New Labour' politics of Tony Blair and Gordon Brown would not have existed without her. Her legacy remains the core of modern British politics: the world economic crisis since 2008 has revived many of the arguments of the 1980s, keeping her name at the centre of political debate in Britain. Larry P. Arnn. A Tribute to Margaret Thatcher. (adapted from remarks delivered at a ceremony in honor of Margaret Thatcher sponsored by the Hillsdale chapter of Young Americans for Freedom on April 22, 2013) Reprinted by permission from Imprimis , a publication of Hillsdale College. May/June 2013. Former UK Prime Minister Margaret Thatcher has died - The Boston Globe Advertisement Lady Thatcher became prime minister in May 1979, 18 months before her friend Ronald Reagan was elected president.

Deng Xiaoping, John Paul II, and, later, Mikhail Gorbachev may have played a more significant role in the worldwide rightward shift that marked the final quarter of the 20th century. None, however, more clearly symbolized that shift, or worked more enthusiastically to further it, than Reagan and Lady Thatcher. “I am not a consensus politician,” she announced upon assuming leadership of the Conservative Party, in February 1975. “I am a conviction politician.” Lady Thatcher’s convictions — in favor of free-market economics and Victorian values, against state socialism and personal permissiveness — were deeply polarizing (something she readily, even proudly admitted) and flew in the face of several decades of British politics. “There is no such thing as society,” she said in 1987, indicating her commitment to the primacy of the individual and markets. Prior to Lady Thatcher’s coming to power, postwar Britain had been defined by “Butskellism,” as it was called, after two leading politicians of the 1950s, the Conservative Rab Butler and the Laborite Hugh Gaitskell.

The term stood for a tacit agreement on the need for government intervention in economic and social policy to provide for the common good. “Thatcherism,” the only ism ital ever named for a British prime minister, rejected that consensus. It counted among its achievements privatizing such state-run enterprises as British Airways and Rolls-Royce, tripling the number of Britons who owned stock, and increasing home ownership by more than 25 percent. Critics, however, cited unemployment levels during the early ’80s not seen since the Great Depression and an unprecedented fraying of the nation’s social fabric. Thatcherism was as much about style as policy. As proudly middle class as its namesake, it disdained aristocratic snobbery as well as working-class egalitarianism. Thatcherism was about getting things done rather than getting along or going along. The taste for irony and understatement evinced by such Conservative predecessors as Harold Macmillan and Alec Douglas-Home was utterly alien to Lady Thatcher. Defiantly impolitic, she said what she meant — and said it bluntly.

“I always found the most effective weapon was ‘No’ or sometimes ‘No, No, No!,’“ she said in her maiden speech to the House of Lords. Lady Thatcher’s blend of candor and assertiveness entranced supporters and enraged opponents. Unlike Reagan, whose affability helped make his policies popular, she earned a reputation for inflexibility, stridency, and arrogance. Rather than regretting such an image, Lady Thatcher seemed to revel in it. “I think sometimes the prime minister should be intimidating,” she once said. “There’s not much point being a weak, floppy thing in the chair, is there?” Lady Thatcher’s forceful manner and disdain for compromise proved crucial in two of her greatest triumphs: Britain’s victory over Argentina in the Falklands War, in 1982; and the nationwide coal strike that began in March 1984 and ended with the crushing of the miners’ union a year later. Further complicating Lady Thatcher’s image was her sex. “She is so clearly the best man among them,” wrote a Laborite minister, Barbara Castle, upon Lady Thatcher’s election as Conservative leader. The choice of noun was apt as well as pointed.

Lady Thatcher had learned early on that she could ill afford to seem weak in what she once described as the “noisy, boisterous, masculine world” of the House of Commons. In a statement Monday, Meryl Streep, who won a best actress Academy Award for playing Lady Thatcher in the 2011 film “The Iron Lady,” spoke of being in “awe” of “her personal strength and grit.” Streep noted that Lady Thatcher gave “women and girls around the world reason to supplant fantasies of being princesses with a different dream: the real-life option of leading their nation.” Lady Thatcher’s being a woman proved, in some respects, even more asset than liability. It lent her a special fascination, something felt not just by voters and Conservative MPs but other world leaders. Pondering Lady Thatcher’s capacity to combine fierceness and femininity, French President Francois Mitterrand observed, “She has the eyes of Caligula and the mouth of Marilyn Monroe.” Or as pop star Geri Halliwell put it, “We Spice Girls are true Thatcherites.

Thatcher was the first Spice Girl, the pioneer of our ideology — Girl Power.” Caligula, Marilyn, Spice Girl: Lady Thatcher was unlike any other resident of 10 Downing Street, before or since. As she wrote in her memoirs, “My background and experience were not those of a traditional Conservative prime minister. I was less able to depend on automatic deference, but I was also perhaps less intimidated by the risks of change.” Born in Grantham, England, on Oct. 13, 1925, Margaret Hilda Roberts was the second daughter of Alfred Roberts, a grocer and lay Methodist minister, and Beatrice Roberts, a dressmaker. As Lady Thatcher never tired of reminding voters, she grew up “above the shop,” in an apartment that lacked both indoor plumbing and hot water. “My ‘Bloomsbury,’ ” she once wrote, referring to the cultural hub of radicalism in the 1920s and ’30s, “was Grantham — Methodism, the grocer’s shop, Rotary and all the serious, sober virtues cultivated and esteemed in that environment.” The most important influence on Lady Thatcher was her father.

From him, she obtained both her love of politics (a town councilor, he later became Grantham’s mayor) and strong sense of self. A favorite piece of advice, one much taken to heart, was “Never do things just because other people do them.” Lady Thatcher excelled at school and won a scholarship to Oxford University. She majored in chemistry and was the first female president of the Oxford University Conservative Association. After graduating, in 1947, Lady Thatcher spent four years working as a research chemist (she later became a lawyer). Lady Thatcher ran for Parliament in 1950 and ’51 in a solidly Labor district. She lost both times, but drew the attention of Conservative Party leaders. She interrupted her political career to marry Denis Thatcher, a wealthy businessman 10 years her senior, in December 1951. His genial, unemphatic personality would prove an ideal complement to her driven, sometimes-intemperate manner. “Typical of Margaret,” Thatcher remarked after his wife gave birth to a son and daughter, Mark and Carol, in 1953.

“She produced twins … and avoided the necessity of a second pregnancy.” Sir Denis Thatcher died in 2003. Elected to Parliament in 1959, Lady Thatcher was given a minor Cabinet position just two years later. She held various posts in the Conservative shadow Cabinet while the party was out of office, from 1964 to 1970, in such major ministries as energy, transportation, and education. She was the only woman in Edward Heath’s Cabinet. As minister for education and science she drew criticism for eliminating free milk for schoolchildren, earning her the sobriquet “Thatcher the milk snatcher.” Dissatisfaction with Heath was growing after Labor’s victory in 1974. When more prominent party figures shrank from opposing him, Lady Thatcher stepped forward. She led her party to victory in May 1979, gaining a 43-seat majority in Parliament. Lady Thatcher’s efforts to curb inflation and cut taxes met with success. They also led to a doubling of unemployment. As criticism of her policies mounted in 1980, Lady Thatcher declared, “To those waiting with bated breath for that favorite media catchphrase, the U-turn, I have only this to say.

‘You turn if you want; the lady’s not for turning.’“ By late 1981, she had the lowest popularity rating ever recorded in a public opinion poll for a British prime minister. Yet two developments came to Lady Thatcher’s rescue. At home, Labor moved further left and the emergence of new center-left party, the Social Democrats, helped splinter opposition. Abroad, in 1982, Argentina seized the Falkland Islands. Lady Thatcher’s popularity soared with her steadfast leadership during the victorious 10-week military conflict that followed. “Great Britain is great again,” she proclaimed. Calling for elections in June 1983, Lady Thatcher led the Conservatives to a 144-seat majority in Parliament. Four years later, Conservatives won a 102-seat majority. Yet many senior Conservatives had grown restive under Lady Thatcher’s rule. Further weakening her popularity was widespread opposition to a poll tax and the privatizing of water and electrical utilities. In addition, her growing criticism of European Community policy — especially the prospect of British participation in the European Monetary System — set the stage for efforts to overturn her leadership. The first, in 1989, proved unsuccessful. The second, in Nov.

1990, did not. Lady Thatcher’s backing of John Major had proved crucial in his selection as her successor. He was far from being a dyed-in-the-wool Thatcherite, and his predecessor grew increasingly critical of him. In 1997, Lady Thatcher was widely quoted as saying of Major’s Labor opponent, “Tony [Blair] won’t let us down.” By 1998, though, she was saying of Blair (who had won a landslide victory two years before), “I’m worried about that young man, he’s getting awfully bossy.” Still, it might be that the greatest tribute paid to Lady Thatcher was the way in which Blair, rather than rejecting Thatcherism, did his best to present himself as carrying on its tradition of forward-looking vigor and entrepreneurial optimism. In addition to her children, Lady Thatcher leaves two grandchildren. A sister, Muriel, died in 2004. A ceremonial funeral will be held at London’s St. Paul’s Cathedral next week. Mark Feeney can be reached at mfeeney@globe.com .

Top 10 Trending Articles Margaret Thatcher — Somerville College Oxford Chemist, Lawyer & Politician Margaret Roberts (1943) read Chemistry at Somerville under her tutor, Nobel prize-winner Dorothy Hodgkin. She worked briefly as a research chemist before marrying Dennis Thatcher in 1951 and qualifying as a barrister in 1954. Margaret Thatcher’s political career was launched in 1959 when she was elected Conservative Member of Parliament for Finchley, a constituency she held until 1992. It wasn’t long before she obtained her first front bench post as junior minister for pensions in Harold Macmillan’s government. The Conservatives lost in 1964 but Margaret Thatcher was re-elected and held a number of posts in the Shadow Cabinet. Edward Heath became prime minister in 1970 and Thatcher was appointed Secretary of State for Education. The Conservatives were defeated in 1974 following which Thatcher replaced Heath as leader of the party. She became Prime Minister in 1979 when the Conservatives returned to power and she held office for three consecutive terms – resigning in 1990 following a leadership challenge by Michael Heseltine.

During her term of office she privatised state-owned industries and utilities, reformed the trade unions, lowered taxes and reduced social welfare expenditure. Abroad, she cultivated relationships with the world’s leaders, Ronald Reagan in the USA in particular, resulting in an international profile and influence for the UK which has rarely been greater during peacetime. The two wars in which she led the country, the Falklands war against the invasion by Argentina in 1982 and the first Gulf War (1991) both ended relatively quickly and successfully. Her policies and her views were often controversial however, and she has faced fierce criticism as well as enthusiastic support throughout her career. In 1992, Thatcher took her seat in the House of Lords as Baroness Thatcher of Kesteven. Somerville has previously launched two extraordinarily successful appeals in Margaret Thatcher’s name, which have raised funds for the Margaret Thatcher Conference Centre and helped support Fellowships in both Chemistry and Law. The College is now embarking on a groundbreaking initiative to honour the pioneering spirit of a remarkable Somervillian, a trailblazing woman and notable post-war leader.

About Somerville Margaret Thatcher, 87; prime minister remade England - The Boston Globe Advertisement Lady Thatcher became prime minister in May 1979, 18 months before her friend Ronald Reagan was elected president. Deng Xiaoping, John Paul II, and, later, Mikhail Gorbachev may have played a more significant role in the worldwide rightward shift that marked the final quarter of the 20th century. None, however, more clearly symbolized that shift, or worked more enthusiastically to further it, than Reagan and Lady Thatcher. Johnny Eggitt/AFP/Getty Images/File 1989 Lady Thatcher acknowledged applause at the end of the Conservative Party conference in Blackpool in 1989. “I am not a consensus politician,” she announced upon assuming leadership of the Conservative Party, in February 1975. “I am a conviction politician.” Lady Thatcher’s convictions — in favor of free-market economics and Victorian values, against state socialism and personal permissiveness — were deeply polarizing (something she readily, even proudly admitted) and flew in the face of several decades of British politics.

“There is no such thing as society,” she said in 1987, indicating her commitment to the primacy of the individual and markets. Before Lady Thatcher came to power, postwar Britain had been defined by “Butskellism,” as it was called, after two leading politicians of the 1950s, the Conservative Rab Butler and the Laborite Hugh Gaitskell. The term stood for a tacit agreement on the need for government intervention in economic and social policy to provide for the common good. “Thatcherism,” the only -ism ever named for a British prime minister, rejected that consensus. It counted among its achievements privatizing such state-run enterprises as British Airways and Rolls-Royce, tripling the number of Britons who owned stock, and increasing home ownership by more than 25 percent. Critics, however, cited unemployment levels during the early 1980s not seen since the Great Depression and an unprecedented fraying of the nation’s social fabric. Thatcherism was as much about style as policy. As proudly middle class as its namesake, it disdained aristocratic snobbery as well as working-class egalitarianism.

Thatcherism was about getting things done rather than getting along or going along. The taste for irony and understatement evinced by such Conservative predecessors as Harold Macmillan and Alec Douglas-Home was utterly alien to Lady Thatcher. Defiantly impolitic, she said what she meant — and said it bluntly. “I always found the most effective weapon was ‘No’ or sometimes ‘No, No, No!’ ’’ she said in her maiden speech to the House of Lords. AFP/Getty Images/File 1980 Lady Thatcher attended the Franco-British summit in Paris. Lady Thatcher’s blend of candor and assertiveness entranced supporters and enraged opponents. Unlike Reagan, whose affability helped make his policies popular, she earned a reputation for inflexibility, stridency, and arrogance. Rather than regretting such an image, Lady Thatcher seemed to revel in it. “I think sometimes the prime minister should be intimidating,” she once said.

“There’s not much point being a weak, floppy thing in the chair, is there?” Lady Thatcher’s forceful manner and disdain for compromise proved crucial in two of her greatest triumphs: Britain’s victory over Argentina in the Falklands War, in 1982; and the nationwide coal strike that began in March 1984 and ended with the crushing of the miners union a year later. Further complicating her image was her sex. “She is so clearly the best man among them,” wrote a Laborite minister, Barbara Castle, upon Lady Thatcher’s election as Conservative leader. The choice of noun was apt as well as pointed. Lady Thatcher had learned early on that she could ill afford to seem weak in what she once described as the “noisy, boisterous, masculine world” of the House of Commons.

In a statement Monday, Meryl Streep, who won a best actress Academy Award for playing Lady Thatcher in the 2011 film “The Iron Lady,” spoke of being in awe of “her personal strength and grit.” Streep noted that Lady Thatcher gave “women and girls around the world reason to supplant fantasies of being princesses with a different dream: the real-life option of leading their nation.” Lady Thatcher’s being a woman proved, in some respects, even more asset than liability. It lent her a special fascination, something felt not just by voters and Conservative MPs but other world leaders. Pondering Lady Thatcher’s capacity to combine fierceness and femininity, President Francois Mitterrand of France observed, “She has the eyes of Caligula and the mouth of Marilyn Monroe.” Or as pop star Geri Halliwell put it, “We Spice Girls are true Thatcherites. Thatcher was the first Spice Girl, the pioneer of our ideology — Girl Power.” Caligula, Marilyn, Spice Girl: Lady Thatcher was unlike any other resident of 10 Downing Street, before or since. As she wrote in her memoirs, “My background and experience were not those of a traditional Conservative prime minister.

I was less able to depend on automatic deference, but I was also perhaps less intimidated by the risks of change.” Born in Grantham, England, on Oct. 13, 1925, Margaret Hilda Roberts was the second daughter of Alfred Roberts, a grocer and lay Methodist minister, and Beatrice Roberts, a dressmaker. As Lady Thatcher never tired of reminding voters, she grew up “above the shop,” in an apartment that lacked indoor plumbing and hot water. The most important influence on Lady Thatcher was her father. From him, she obtained both her love of politics (a town councilor, he later became Grantham’s mayor) and strong sense of self. Lady Thatcher excelled at school and won a scholarship to Oxford University. She majored in chemistry and was the first female president of the Oxford University Conservative Association. After graduating, in 1947, Lady Thatcher spent four years working as a research chemist (she later became a lawyer). Lady Thatcher ran for Parliament in 1950 and ’51 in a solidly Labor district. She lost both times, but drew the attention of Conservative Party leaders.

She interrupted her political career to marry Denis Thatcher, a wealthy businessman 10 years her senior, in December 1951. His genial, unemphatic personality would prove an ideal complement to her driven, sometimes-intemperate manner. “Typical of Margaret,” Thatcher remarked after his wife gave birth to a son and daughter, Mark and Carol, in 1953. “She produced twins . . . and avoided the necessity of a second pregnancy.” Sir Denis Thatcher died in 2003. Elected to Parliament in 1959, Lady Thatcher was given a minor Cabinet position just two years later. She held various posts in the Conservative shadow Cabinet while the party was out of office, from 1964 to 1970, in such major ministries as energy, transportation, and education. She was the only woman in Edward Heath’s Cabinet. Dissatisfaction with Heath was growing after Labor’s victory in 1974. When more prominent party figures shrank from opposing him, Lady Thatcher stepped forward. She led her party to victory in May 1979, gaining a 43-seat majority in Parliament.

Lady Thatcher’s efforts to curb inflation and cut taxes met with success. They also led to a doubling of unemployment. As criticism of her policies mounted in 1980, Lady Thatcher declared, “To those waiting with bated breath for that favorite media catchphrase, the U-turn, I have only this to say. ‘You turn if you want; the lady’s not for turning.’ ” By late 1981, she had the lowest popularity rating ever recorded in a public opinion poll for a British prime minister. Yet two developments came to her rescue. At home, Labor moved further left and the emergence of the new center-left party, the Social Democrats, helped splinter opposition. Abroad, in 1982, Argentina seized the British-controlled Falkland Islands. Lady Thatcher’s popularity soared with her steadfast leadership during the victorious 10-week military conflict that followed. “Great Britain is great again,” she proclaimed. Calling for elections in June 1983, Lady Thatcher led the Conservatives to a 144-seat majority in Parliament. Four years later, Conservatives won a 102-seat majority. Yet many senior Conservatives had grown restive under Lady Thatcher’s rule.

Further weakening her popularity was widespread opposition to a poll tax and the privatizing of water and electrical utilities. In addition, her growing criticism of European Community policy set the stage for efforts to overturn her leadership. The first, in 1989, proved unsuccessful. The second, in November 1990, did not. Lady Thatcher’s backing of John Major had proved crucial in his selection as her successor. He was far from being a dyed-in-the-wool Thatcherite, and his predecessor grew increasingly critical of him. In 1997, Lady Thatcher was widely quoted as saying of Major’s Labor opponent, “Tony [Blair] won’t let us down.” By 1998, though, she was saying of Blair (who had won a landslide victory two years before), “I’m worried about that young man, he’s getting awfully bossy.” In addition to her children, Lady Thatcher leaves two grandchildren. A sister, Muriel, died in 2004. A ceremonial funeral will be held at St. Paul’s Cathedral in London next week. Mark Feeney can be reached at mfeeney@globe.com .

Top 10 Trending Articles Margaret Thatcher: A life in pictures - BBC News BBC News Margaret Thatcher: A life in pictures 9 April 2013 Read more about sharing. Close share panel Margaret Thatcher was British prime minister from 1979 to 1990 and one of the dominant political figures of 20th Century Britain. Baroness Thatcher has died after suffering a stroke while staying at the Ritz hotel in central London. Books of condolence have been opened including at her former constituency office in Finchley, north London, and in her home town of Grantham. British newspapers have devoted pages of coverage reflecting on the life of Baroness Thatcher. Margaret Thatcher was British prime minister from 1979-90. She was born Margaret Hilda Roberts in Grantham, Lincolnshire, in 1925, the daughter of a local grocer. In 1951 she married a divorced businessman, Denis Thatcher, and began studying for the bar exams, qualifying as a barrister in 1953, the year in which her twins Mark and Carol were born.

Thatcher is pictured here talking to a chimney sweep in Dartford while campaigning in 1951. She lost on that occasion, but finally entered Parliament in 1959 having won the safe Conservative seat of Finchley. Mrs Thatcher entered Downing Street in 1979 as Britain's first female prime minister, promising that the Conservatives would cut income tax, reduce public expenditure, make it easier for people to buy their own homes and curb the power of the unions. In office she soon cultivated a tough image as "the Iron Lady". Her tough reputation was enhanced by military action against Argentina over the Falkland Islands. She survived violence closer to home. In 1984 the IRA blew up the Brighton hotel where she was staying during the Conservative party conference. The blast sent a chimney crashing down through a column of rooms, killing five people. Mrs Thatcher formed a special relationship with US President Ronald Reagan - her political soulmate. On his death she described Mr Reagan as a great American who "won the Cold War". Her premiership began to unravel when she caused splits in the Tory party over Europe and the poll tax. She was ousted as leader - and hence as prime minister - by her own party in 1990.

Following her defeat she returned to No 10 prior to a tearful departure in front of the world’s press. In 2007 Baroness Thatcher became the first living ex-prime minister to be honoured with a statue in the House of Commons. Although the Tory peer suffered a series of minor strokes that affected her short-term memory, she continued to fulfil a number of public engagements. Margaret Thatcher has been called the most influential British political figure since Churchill and was one of the dominant political figures of 20th Century Britain.

Question: Which British political figure became Baroness Kesteven?
Answer: Margaret Thatcher